The Costco Problem
So there is a conversation I want to start in the yoga space. Work that we can be doing, support that we can cultivate, and an awareness that needs to be nurtured. So many folks in our spaces consider themselves to be more progressive-minded, and while this makes a lot of us comfortable, certainly true as we cultivate in-person communities, it also sometimes means we find ourselves in a repeatable pattern of discussion about larger topics, especially those that we find ourselves invested in–like social awareness and change topics. Think things like white supremacy, hetero-normative patriarchy, capitalism, and environmental issues.
I don’t know about you, but I am lucky enough to find myself involved in many of those conversations, as we as a culture in the US, and to some degree the Western world, have a reckoning with these larger topics.
And that luck has also caused me some suffering. Specifically, it had me crying in a Costco parking lot last fall trying to figure out how I had managed to both understand what was happening to my brain and feelings and also be very clear that the reason I was feeling that was because of shitty oppressive systems I didn’t invent.
So gather round, kids, it’s Rebecca’s story time. And like all good stories, it involves a Costco parking lot.
In early 2024 I left a relationship of 14 years–splitting up with the other parent of my youngest child, and spent time working on trying to figure out my life without this relationship, how I had gotten there, and what I needed and/or wanted to heal in order to go forward to life a life that felt right for me and my two kids.
That was all going exactly as you expected, painfully but fulfillingly. I had decided to make a conscious decision to abstain from dating or relationships of any kind for a year, and if you have ever gone through a breakup after a very long-term relationship, you will know the vacuum that you experience when you find yourself single again. Your brain starts to look for a new connection everywhere, with every look across a store, every chance encounter through work, every new person you meet through a mutual friend.
I was deep into unraveling that feeling, and coming to terms with how much space in women’s brains that men actually take up–even when we aren’t actively partnered with one, when I decided to go to Costco to do some shopping in the middle of the day.
You know those times when you start a shopping trip at a grocery store or big box store, and you are just kinda “with” someone? They seem to find themselves in the same aisles that you are in, you are looking at similar things, and your walking pace is similar? It makes for both frustrating and awkward encounters around every corner. It is made much worse if the other person is both unaware that you two are somehow traveling in the same time loop and doesn’t have the innate sense of how stores flow and how to navigate them.
Enter a 65+ year old white dude, whom, for the purposes of this story, I am going to call Bob.
Bob and I were stuck together traveling at the same pace, but Bob also didn’t seem to understand how stores worked and swerved from one side of the aisle to another–many times parking his cart in the absolute middle of Costco’s quite generous aisles so he could navigate looking at both the olive oil and the maple syrup simultaneously.
I was stuck behind Bob f o r e v e r.
So I started taking stock of Bob, trying to figure him out. Did he have a sick wife who usually does the grocery shopping and did not tell Bob that there were unspoken rules at the store? Was Bob that oblivious to the rest of the world? I sometimes feel sorry for men of a certain age who were never taught to be aware of the things around them. While there is absolute privilege in that experience, it also, I think, makes men a lot lonelier than the rest of us understand. Poor Bob needed to just look up enough to get a gauge of his surroundings.
And Bob was wearing a jacket that had his job (I am assuming his previous job) on the back.
As I spent several rows in Costco staring at Bob’s back, looking at his “proud firefighter” emblem on his jacket, my brain started to wander. Bob always managed to be one step ahead of me, and right in front of whatever item I needed, so I was just kinda waiting for him to move so I could shop in peace.
And my brain, that betraying asshole, looped me into one of the hardest shame spirals I had experienced since leaving my ex-husband several months prior to this.
Here is the flow:
“Oh, Bob is a firefighter.”
“I used to know a guy who was a firefighter.”
“Huh, he was hot, and I haven’t seen him forever.”
“Oh shit, if I saw him now I would have to explain that I am now a twice-divorced 46-year-old woman who had two children with two different people”
“God, I am pathetic. Good women don’t do that.”
“My children deserve a better woman as a mother than I am.”
<cut to me, in my car, sobbing in the Costco parking lot>
End scene.
So yeah. Costco got me. It’s funny, because I have told this story for a while now, especially when teaching, and it turns out that Costco’s parking lot gets a lot of us.
But what came next is really the interesting thing.
I sent a sobbing voice text to one of my “I can be a mess with you” friends (my favorite kinds of people, really) telling her this story.
And she responded with the very correct sentence…
“That isn’t yours. That is the patriarchy talking, and you shouldn’t be ashamed because women don’t get to make mistakes in love and life like men do.”
So fucking true.
As I sat there thinking, “thanks for that” because it was totally true and gave me a much-needed perspective shift, I also realized that it kinda didn’t make me feel any better.
Because while it was absolutely 100% true that the entire sequence of thoughts was a reflection of patriarchal conditioning, it was also me sitting in the parking lot of a Costco at 1 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon sobbing because I was so ashamed of the adult woman I was who made the choices that lead to that story.
And that me didn’t really feel any better just because the thought process was anchored in an oppressive system that fucks with everyone on planet Earth. True, it was a part of my experience, and also why I was taught that good girls stay in marriages even if they are unhealthy and soul sucking even on the good days, especially if they have kids–because we all know children of single moms are gonna be criminals with no moral consciousness (not true via objective data here and here, btw).
But what are we supposed to do in the wild living of our lives, having to go around telling people our stories? How are we supposed to reconcile these experiences?
Maybe your story is the lack of solid medical care you get because your body doesn’t fit societal norms. Maybe it is the expectation that you need to be a certain kind of person or personality because of your sexual identity. Maybe it is that you can never raise your voice because you will get pegged as “angry” when really your experience of being frustrated or angry is incredibly justified. Maybe it is that you aren’t as assertive or “alpha” as you are supposed to be.
But, you know what? That shit is personal, no matter how much we tie our experiences to oppressive social systems.
And I think yoga folks can help build some bridges in this arena.
As we culturally become more aware of the bigger societal challenges we all face (and I do mean “we all” quite literally), there is a gap between the larger conversations we have about oppression and the real-life experiences we face daily.
Because who TF cares why we experience the constant derision of doctors when we can’t get adequate medical care?? I am supposed to care about being sick AND body shame? Just stop..
Our first steps need to be doing the work on ourselves to unravel and unpack our own understandings of existing oppressive components, like hetero-normative patriarchy (that’s a big term, find a good definition here), before we can build bridges to help others process their own experiences.
I don’t know what I would do without my friends who are here to see and support me on more than one level. Those friends who can say “I hate how folks who identify as women are judged so unfairly for our very normal life choices–even when people don’t know the whole story about us”, but also say “fuck, I hate that you were sobbing in Costco’s parking lot, want me to snag you a chai?”.
We need those people to help us unravel and process the world on more than one level. I am so lucky to have those people in my life, and I hope you do too.
Cuz honestly, nobody has time on a Thursday afternoon to be taken out of commission by a random dude who doesn’t know how shopping works.
xx,
R
Want to unravel topics like this with me?
I have a virtual book club happening starting in June, with one of my favorite people to call when the experiences of life get complicated–Colice Sanders. Colice will be leading us through the book Hey Hun: Sales, Sisterhood, Supremacy, and Other Lies Behind Multi-level Marketing, which dives deep into the patriarchy in women-dominated spaces (ahem–like yoga).